...................FOR CNTRYFORCE.............................................
Jonathan Marder directed my attention to your Sep. 29 letter in this
forum and I have to suscribe for a moment to deliver this. It's content shook me as much as the "Peace beyond.." touched me
and reminded me of another mail way back (Jason Gaedtke) who found our discussion completely futile and counter to
everything he stood for. Not that I particularly want to endear
myself in everybody's eyes, but please try to see it this way.
You regard the rhetoricians as the good guys up against the evil
dialecticians and that's correct by the ZAMM standards, but we are
discussing LILA and the MOQ. Translated into moqish (most of the LS last month conceded that what ZAMM describes
is Intellect's rise above Society) the whole bad/evil thing is inverted.
Intellect is the higher static good!. But please, follow my reasoning to the end.
And this ZAMM - LILA discrepancy is why I so badly want my
SOL.. idea to be incorporated in the MOQ. If ZAMM describes how Intellect freed itself from Society, Intellect -is not a realm where shadowy reflections of reality resides, it is A NEW STATIC REALITY that looks upon creation (the levels below itself) through a new pair of value glasses that gives existence the ability to see the lower levels (Society preferably) as "subjective" and itself as "objective".
In LILA P. speaks of (religious) mysticism as an expression of
Dynamic Quality and if it is DQ's tendency to break from the last
static prison, the last one must necessarily be Intellect's and the ones that performs this act are the mystics (your "Peace Beyond..." was an example). But most do it intuitively and resent our ceaseless dialectics - even if it is supposed to be about the Quality idea.
A rebellion against an era must be on that era's premises. An escape from Intellect must - at first - be on Intellects home ground. Mystical arguments are easily and safely disarmed as "noble nonsense" and forgotten. We simply must keep up the Intellectual guise, but at the bottom of our hearts we are rebels (some of us at least :-)).
Look to the Science vs Church struggle in the Renaissance times (which was a replay of the Greek experience). Bruno, Kepler,
Galileo couldn't present their works as "scientific" but had to go by
that era's premise: An interpretation of God's work full of Biblical references. Even Newton, two hundred years later, regarded a now obscure religious treaty as his main work; not the Principia!! But we know how history went, the said persons are regarded as "undercover agents" for rationality which is now the premises.
For a long time Intellect will be the ruling "metaphysics" and we will
have to play by its rules, but rest assured, it's days as "church of reason" are counted.
Bo
..................................FOR ROGER ............................
Re. your message of 3Oct. Do you have the proverb in English about "reading the Bible like the Devil"? You and I are probably looking upon each other as such an activity :-) The part that you use is where Pirsig is doing a comparative studies of his and William James' ideas, and not where the MOQ is on its own home turf. You quote LILA:
"Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he (James) described as 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories'. In this basic flux of experience, the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure experience cannot be called either physical or psychical: it logically precedes this distinction."
I think I have spotted the source of our differences. All the static levels are "secondary" compared to "pure experience" (Dynamic Value), which means that also Intellect is static and secondary. The "pure experience" from where Intellect derives its subjects and objects does not impinge directly upon Intellect, but is filtered through ALL the static levels. That is after all the most basic tenet of the MOQ. Unless that is seen Intellect becomes the freefloating mind of SOM that "creates" reality; completely antroposentric and damaging! Pirsig says that it is Dynamic Quality that creates reality - not Intellect!
Earlier in another message you said a little triumphantly to me something like this: "So you DO admit that the levels are created..." Roger please, I DID answer that they were created .
".....Q2. CREATED by Robert Maynard Pirsig as a representative
of Quality, not as a cerebral exercise." were my exact words.
But I forgive you magnanimously. It's beyond human capacity to keep tracks of all what is said or by who in this maze.
Bo
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